Of Kings and Sisters
by FyreFlyte
Summary: In which Peter and Edmund attempt to help the Queens...and end up getting a bit more than what they had bargained for.


_Hello everyone! I'd like to give a HUGE thank you to phoenixqueen for being my beta. She is amazing! :) _

_The usual disclaimer applies, of course: the Pevensies do not belong to me...although they are a lot of fun to play with. ;)_

_I had a lot of fun writing this. :) Enjoy!_

* * *

I must be slightly insane.

That had to be the only explanation. Nobody else in their right minds would have ever – and I mean _ever_ – agreed to what I had agreed to. Not if they knew Lucy as well as I did.

"Edmund!" my sister half-shrieked, "Watch where you're going, please! Don't step on those flowers!"

I looked down in surprise and hastily backtracked. I had been about to squish the violets that Lucy had just planted. Why, why, _why _had I agreed to help her with the garden? What on earth had I been thinking?

"If you don't mind, Your Majesty," a small voice said from my feet, and I looked down again in alarm, nearly positive that I had just destroyed something, "You're standing right where I need to plant."

"Oh," I said in embarrassment to the Badger at my feet, "Sorry…"

He chuckled softly as I picked my way out of the danger zone, tripping over a trowel and nearly landing face-first on a rake in the process. I tiptoed around the object, grateful that I hadn't skewered my eyes. I glanced longingly towards the castle, wondering what Peter was up to. He had agreed to help Susan with hanging a large collection of tapestries and paintings that we had recently found in a forgotten storage room.

I had happily volunteered to help Lucy, believing that planting flowers was much safer than trying to hang a tapestry to Susan's satisfaction. I was apparently quite wrong. I was a complete disaster with anything that remotely resembled a gardening tool.

"Edmund, could you plant these for me?" Lucy called from the other end of the danger zone. "I need to help Willa with something."

Willa was a stately old dryad that had volunteered to look after the garden. She had mentioned to my sisters that it was in dire need of a makeover, and unfortunately, said sisters had taken on the project with unprecedented enthusiasm. I gulped.

"Of course, Lucy. I'll be right there." Assuming I didn't kill myself – or, just as likely, a plant – in the process of getting over to her. Why did she have to be on the _other _end of the garden?

"Careful, Your Majesty!" a little dryad said in alarm. She couldn't have been any more than a few years old. "You're going to crush those flowers."

"Right," I muttered, looking at a patch of perfectly flower-free earth and concluding that seeds had just been planted there. How was anyone supposed to tell the difference? "Thank you."

The dryad giggled. "Not there, Your Majesty," she said, "_There._"

I looked down at where she was pointing and jumped…which effectively squashed the plants that I had been standing half an inch away from.

Ah. _Those _flowers.

"Uh oh," I said, looking in dismay at the flattened colors on the ground, "I'm sorry! Do you know who planted these?"

"I did," the dryad said shyly, looking a little embarrassed. "I'm sorry that I didn't warn you sooner."

"That's all right," I told her, "It's my fault, anyway. I'm absolutely no good at gardening." She looked at me, puzzled.

"Then why did you volunteer to help Queen Lucy?" she wondered. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth. "Oh! I'm sorry, King Edmund. I shouldn't have said that."

I laughed. "No, that's fine. You're absolutely right, at any rate. I have no idea what I was thinking." I smiled to reassure her. "Can I help you re-plant these?" I gestured to the mush at my feet.

She looked at me doubtfully.

"On second thought, maybe I should go help Queen Lucy," I said. She giggled.

"Yes, you should. I'll re-plant these, if you don't mind."

"I don't."

* * *

I, Peter Pevensie, am completely mental.

And I, High King Peter, am too chivalrous to warn myself about my mentality. Especially when helping my sisters is concerned.

"Where do you want this one, Su?" I asked wearily, dragging another rolled-up tapestry to the landing. She glanced at me before returning to her measurements of the blank wall I was facing.

"Unroll it and let me see how big it is. It seems a bit wide for this wall, but the landing above this is a bit wider, so it will probably look lovely up there," she said, marking a measurement on a piece of paper lying on the top step.

I suppressed a groan and mentally kicked myself again for ever agreeing to do this. I supposed that dragging a huge tapestry up another flight of stairs would be good for me (Oreius would have approved, at any rate), but at the moment I was thinking completely the opposite. I should have left when the fauns that had been helping us had decided to go to the gardens to help Lucy. Susan, it turned out, was extremely picky about the exact placement of tapestries, and after hanging each one five times – at least – many of our helpers had made hasty excuses and escaped.

Resigning myself, I unrolled the tapestry, nearly fell off the stairs because it was so much longer than I had expected, glanced at it, and then really _did _fall off the stairs. Susan started at the crash I made as I tripped and latched on to the railing.

"Peter!" she said, shocked. "What happened?"

I blushed. High Kings weren't exactly expected to put themselves in physical danger while unrolling tapestries.

"Um…oops?" I mumbled sheepishly, scrambling back to my feet and jogging back up the steps to my sister. My arms were bruised from grabbing the railing, and I sighed. Bruises were exactly what I needed while dragging hideous wall carpets around the Cair.

Susan was gaping at said hideous wall carpet when I reached her.

"What _is_ that?" she wondered, sounding disgusted. I looked at the tapestry in trepidation, remembering the brief glance I'd had of it and hoping that it wasn't as ugly as I'd thought at first.

I was wrong. It was even uglier.

It is true that colors in Narnia are much brighter, vibrant, and generally much prettier than in England, but in this case the colors only served to make the picture worse. It was of some unidentifiable animal, probably a cross between a Fell Beast and an ogre, and it must have been every combination of colors that _shouldn't _have been combined. Ever. It was positively hideous.

"Forgive me if I refuse to put this up on a wall," I said flatly. I would give anything for my siblings – including my life – but this was truly an awful piece of carpet. For the first time today, Susan agreed with me.

"You'd better put that one back in the storage room," she said, looking at it in askance, as if she'd never imagined that something in Narnia could be so ugly. "And while you're down there, make sure that the others aren't as bad. We still have a lot of landings to decorate, and I don't want to waste any more time with…um, things like that." She cast another look at the tapestry and grimaced.

I stifled a relieved laugh before the impact of her words hit me. I groaned inwardly, soundly berating myself again for ever agreeing to help decorate.

I had to carry the tapestry back down the seven flights of stairs that I had just come up. And there were approximately fifty more tapestries in the storage room that I now had to unroll, look at, sort, and re-roll.

And some of them might be just as awful as the one I was holding.

* * *

I cast an anxious look into the corridor, slipped out of the passageway I was in, and took off. I sprinted down the hall and nearly collided with the door I was heading for, completely startling the guards. With a hasty "Sorry," I shoved the door open and tumbled gratefully inside, practically slamming it behind me.

A startled yelp made me whirl, unconsciously squeaking in surprise. I'd thought that the room was empty.

"Ed!" Peter gasped in relief and flopped back onto the bed that he'd leapt off of. "You nearly gave me a heart attack just now. Have you ever heard of knocking?"

"Sorry," I panted, grinning apologetically at him, "I was afraid that one of the girls would come around the corner at any minute. I didn't want Lucy to rope me in to pulling weeds or anything."

Peter snorted and covered his eyes with his hand.

"At least you didn't have to balance on a windowsill and move a tapestry _exactly _six centimeters to the left. Or something like that. I forget the particulars." An absurd mental image of my brother balancing, one-footed, on a windowsill while holding a tasseled carpet sprang suddenly into my mind, and I couldn't stop the snort of laughter that came out of my mouth. Peter scowled and peered at me through his fingers.

"It is _not _funny. I have bruises, you know. And you should have seen the ogre that was on one of them." He shuddered. "It was perfectly horrendous."

I couldn't help it. I started laughing harder, and before I knew it I was flopped on the bed next to my brother, tears running down my cheeks as I imagined his exasperating morning. Peter gave in and laughed along with me, shrugging helplessly.

"At least you didn't squash about five hundred flowers," I finally choked, once I'd managed to get my amusement under control. Peter bit his lip in an effort to keep from laughing.

"Did Lucy kick you out of the garden?" he asked. I made a face.

"Lucy and about five other dryads, including Willa," I admitted. "She told me to not come back unless I had a map that told me exactly where I could walk and where I couldn't."

Peter bit his lip harder. I whacked him with a pillow.

"Well, I'd like to see _you _try and navigate your way through there," I told him indignantly. "It's impossible to tell where seeds have been planted and where they haven't, and what with the work rate that was going on….flowers were just popping up _everywhere._"

A muffled choking sound came from underneath the pillow covering Peter's head. I groaned.

"All right, _fine!_ Go ahead and laugh. But when Lucy asks _you _to plant flowers, I want to be there," I said, exasperated and yet glad that he found it funny. Peter took the pillow off his head and looked at me with shining eyes, a broad grin stretched across his face.

"You'd better visit your tutor, then," he said. I frowned.

"Why?"

"Because Willa won't allow you in without a map!" He burst out laughing, and I promptly covered his head with the pillow again.

"Oh fine, fine, _fine,_" I groaned, knowing that the dryad probably _would _make sure that I had a map with me the next time I went within twenty feet of the new garden, "I won't watch, then. Just do me one favor."

Peter pushed the pillow off his head and looked at me. "What?"

"The next time that Lucy or Susan asks us to do anythingthat involves gardening or decorating, you get the garden and I get the tapestries."

He nodded fervently. "Definitely. Do you think that Oreius would count this as a part of our training?"

"Are you crazy?" I stared at him and shook my head, "The last thing that we want to do is give him any new ideas!"

"Oh…right." Peter shrugged. "It was a good thought, though."

I stared at him. "Could you imagine trying to explain to a centaur how squashing flowers and balancing on windowsills counts as training for battle?" I asked. Peter frowned.

"It doesn't sound very good when you put it that way," he admitted. I whacked him with a second pillow.

"Let's just resolve to forget this morning," I said, "I've had enough of flowers and deadly garden tools to last a lifetime." Peter stifled a laugh, sobered, and then nodded solemnly.

"Agreed."

_~Fin~_

* * *

_So…what do you think? ;) _


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